Pearls that were his eyes
by AKKON
Summary: Nothing surprises Lara more than to be proven wrong. "People like us, Kurtis, we don't pass away in the open, do we. We'll crawl deep, deep into some burrow to stop the world from witnessing our shame." AoD's last scene.


**A/N: This is a scene that's been done to death, but never to my complete satisfaction. I realize that different people will have different takes on the characters, but personally, I could never relate to an emotional, sentimental Lara Croft (and yes, I'm aware that 'my' Lara is a psycho. Sorry, but that woman has simply seen and done too much to be anything else... blame it on Core!) The title is, btw, borrowed from Shakespeare's "The Tempest"

* * *

**

**Pearls that were his eyes**

It's not the amount of blood (quite a lot), the paleness or the immobility. She won't need the old trick with the mirror, or two fingers to his neck to corroborate her certainty. Absence of life is a most powerful presence, and one she's often encountered before. More times than she'd care to count she has witnessed the revealing moment when the soul flees the flesh, and what she sees now, in front of her, is nothing but a carcass, an empty package, a machinery of muscles and organs as delicate as a clockwork, and the clock has stopped ticking. Dead meat, and soon he'll be even less than that.

She squats down, slowly, with all the care of a criminologist inspecting a crime scene (she is not a criminologist, this is not a crime scene, this is just a battlefield, a bloody mess. _Bloody_ being the key word). His face is turned to the wall, away from her; from her position she can't see if his eyes are open in amazement, still wondering why life can desert us so easily, so fast. One of his hands is spread open, palm up. It looks like a carving on display, pale coral or ivory, almost beautiful against the lining of russet velvet.

Silly boy went and got himself killed. The thought makes her mouth twitch, not because she finds death amusing, but because it's so predictable, the ending. Got himself killed, and what on earth did he think she'd do on finding him -place coins on his eyes (pearls that were his eyes, soon nothing) say a prayer, shed a few tears?

Silly boy, she's nothing like that. It's a puzzle, why the world cries out in outrage every time a soldier is killed. Surely becoming a soldier means that one has weighed the risks? Death is more than a mere possibility, and it doesn't always happen only to the others.

And yet. It's not exactly _upset_ she feels, more like a mild twinge of disappointment. Perhaps because the way he touched her, grinned at her, the quizzical looks, the few words they exchanged, suggested a promise of things to come -and everything to wilt like this, end this way. To go down not in a blaze of glory but in a gory puddle, deep in the innards of some foreign city. Vanish from life as if life had never happened in the first place. Leaving nothing, an anachronistic weapon she has no clue how to handle and that holds no romantic memories for her (unless she should find having had her neck nearly sliced open with it 'romantic', which she doesn't) and a handful of fleeting moments she could retell in less than a hundred words.

She leans over and drops the glaive into his open hand, not bothering to make the lax fingers match the holes of the disc. Not much in the way of a parting ceremony, but considering her hoarding habits, quite the homage.

"Must be getting sentimental in my old age," she tells him, shaking her head at the fondness she feels for him now, when it doesn't matter anymore. Her fingers, empty again, free at last, flick absently the flakes of dried blood off her boot. Like the criminologist she isn't, she can read this Braille of suffering, the trail of blood, the long brown smear that marks his last journey. He didn't die where he got killed, and doesn't she know, understand, this hopeless search for a spot dark enough to curl up and die. "People like us, Kurtis, we don't pass away in the open, do we. We'll crawl deep, deep into some burrow to stop the world from witnessing our shame."

Her voice sounds tinny and hollow in the empty arena. Rising, she scans the perimeters, already foreseeing her next steps. The quest is over, but the aftermath is fanning before her a million joyless tasks. There will be the police to convince, the lengthy interrogations in bleak rooms, the legal tangles, the solicitors fees, probably several days wearing a hideous hospital gown too (she thinks a couple of her ribs are cracked, her left wrist has swollen to alarming proportions, there's a dull buzz in her head that can only signify her eardrums popped with the last blast) Nothing new here. All the many things she'll have to take care of before she can finally relax with a mug of tea in front of her fireplace.

She stumbles away, carrying nothing this time. One of these nights, when she's feeling somewhat low, somewhat self-pitying, probably more than a little drunk, she'll start telling Winston a story, a pointless narration with no message and no moral that can be told in less than a hundred hesitant, broken words. There was a man. Always lurking around me. He was young, and stunning, he had the softest voice ever. I thought the future held a surprise in store at last, something I had never anticipated, never hoped for. As if I had stumbled in midyear across the hidden Christmas presents, all wrapped up in bright, rustling tissue, big red fancy bow on top. And then, silly boy went and got himself killed.

In the mutual understanding grown from a lifetime of shared silences, Winston will nod and just wait for her to finish, to untie the ribbon on the life of someone she never got to know. To peek inside that box and see if it's empty.

But he was real. He was.

One last time she looks over her shoulder. A few feet away, he's already blending in with the darkness. "And you know what, Kurtis? For a moment I thought you had never been. I guess this was my gift."

_Of his bones are coral made;_

_Those are pearls that were his eyes:_

_Nothing of him that doth fade_

_but doth suffer a sea-change_

_into something rich and strange._

**The End**


End file.
